


King of Infinite Space

by isozyme



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare, SHAKESPEARE William - Works
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Gen, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-11
Updated: 2012-10-11
Packaged: 2017-11-16 02:58:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/534731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isozyme/pseuds/isozyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We were meant to land at a star.  Never to live like this, nomads and thieves," Hamlet said.</p>
<p>Horatio hadn't believed him at the time.  They hadn't seemed adrift--Denmark was the greatest crumbling empire a man could imagine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	King of Infinite Space

If he packed his days carefully full, the spaces in between activity were reserved for exhaustion, and Horatio would not fracture from remembering what had been before.  The ship needed attention in all of its tiny details.  The kitchens, the oxygen orchards, the school--it all ran perfectly in theory, but where theory became practice Horatio was able to run himself ragged patching up what slipped through the cracks.  The Danish nation-ship had flown for centuries, maybe longer, but Horatio now counted time from the day that Hamlet died and the Norwegians came.

On the first day, a small Norwegian ship landed with a scream of overridden airlocks and Fortinbras strode into Denmark, dashing in a foreign captain's garb.  She destroyed the coms system before even the first rumors could hatch and fly across the view-screens.Then she locked every door on the ship for eighteen hours, and in that eighteen hours the people of Denmark clustered together in isolated, terrified groups while Norway's tiny army rifled through their nation-ship, opening doors one at a time and locking each behind them by hand.

Eventually Fortinbras unlocked enough doors that everyone could get to a dining hall and a toilet, although the coms stayed down.  

Horatio still found locked doors in every route he took through Denmark, and he felt like half of his life had been spent arguing, wheedling and bribing them open.  It had barely been a week.

Horatio stood wearily, leaning on a locked door like it was the only thing keeping him standing.  On the other side of the door, through a tiny vent, the woman he had come to speak with leaned likewise.

The Norwegian guard that stood by and allowed them to talk glanced at Horatio, impatient.  Horatio dug into his pocket and produced more Danish crowns, aware of the irony of using currency named after Denmark's mythical royalty to pay conquering Norwegian guards for small favors.  The guard took them, smiling, and walked down the hall to let them speak more privately.

"People are sick, and there is nowhere to put them,"  whispered the anonymous woman.  Horatio imagined from her voice that she was short and slight, sent to speak with him due to some tragic bravery.  She did not mention any hurts from Norwegian sabers, but Horatio could guess from the bitterness in her tone.

"I will talk with Norway.  They will open the doors to the medical bays," Horatio promised.

If he were ever to do it again, he thought, perhaps he would have stayed in his quarters to grieve over the events that had led up to Fortinbras's swift take-over instead of venturing forth to help.  It would have been quieter there, with fewer reminders of everything Denmark had lost.  He would not have seen the fliers pasted to the walls asking after missing relatives, and would not have watched Norwegian solders scraping the walls clean again.

This was the only way that Horatio could think of to save them all.  When Horatio was honest with himself, he knew that he was not important.  He had tangled himself in politics for the sake of Hamlet; for Hamlet he knew what hands to shake and which offices to knock at.  Nothing more.  He would talk to enough frightened, desperate Danes, slide bribes into enough pale Norwegian hands, and maybe the chaos would recede.  

"Are you working for the resistance?  Do you know where Osric--" the woman on the other side of the door said, before Horatio interrupted.

"I don't sympathize," Horatio said, although his voice didn't have any venom left in it--no more poison, not ever again poison, he thought--just resignation.

There was a shocked and terrified silence from across the door, reminding Horatio that Fortinbras still fixed her problems with violence.  "I can't watch them fight and die for nothing," he tried to explain.  "There's no one else to be captain."  He did not say, as he was tempted to, that everyone else was dead.  Osric's circle of minor Danish officers and rich sons was something Horatio wanted no part of; he did not want more death to tear Denmark farther apart.

"Tell Osric to be careful," he said.  There was a moment when Horatio could have apologized, broken the tension or twisted it.  Instead he shoved himself away from the door and walked down the corridor, adding the barred medical bays to his mental list of things that needed to change.

#

"I must speak with Fortinbras," Horatio said, trying to sound like he belonged at the door to the bridge.  The guard ignored him.

Horatio wasn't in the mood to dance around a reluctant secretary until he was granted official clearance.  "I need to visit the bridge, computer troubles.  The Ophelia system is causing interference,” he lied.

On Norway, they didn't customarily name the ship's operating system, despite the complex AI keeping the ship running for generations.  To Horatio it seemed rude to treat the massive computer like a machine.  The captain and his wife had grieved terribly when Ophelia had shut down and corrupted her re-boot system.  The comatose AI ran on autopilot until Fortinbras booted up her ship's system onto Denmark's hardware, quiescent Ophelia locked away underneath a tangle of patches and workarounds.  Every Norwegian was leery of touching her; they said she felt like ghosts.

In school, Horatio had studied to spend his life as one Ophelia’s several curators.  He knew her language and did not believe in any of her phantoms.  It was Horatio's cache of university jargon that convinced the guard, who waved him up a familiar narrow steel staircase.

The bridge had been cold when Horatio visited it for the first time.  Hamlet had opened the door like it was a gift and pushed Horatio across the threshold with a gentle shove in the small of his back and a conspiratorial smile on his face.  They had leaned against the walls, thrilled at this one place where they were able to feel the chill of space and fascinated by the delicacy of the hull protecting their ancient ship.

"We were meant to land at a star.  Never to live like this, nomads and thieves," Hamlet said.

Horatio hadn't believed him at the time.  They hadn't seemed adrift--Denmark was the greatest crumbling empire a man could imagine.

Fortinbras was standing stiff and straight at the flight deck on the bridge, but she turned when Horatio entered, one hand dropping to the hilt of the sword at her hip.  She was tall, and wore heeled boots.  "You've never spoken about Ophelia," she said.  "It is a strange way to get to the bridge."

She was as different from Claudius as a blade was different from poison.  Her foreignness left him uncomfortable and desperate for her to stay, anything to make Denmark into something other than what it was.

Damned rotten ship.  

"I...I needed to speak with you, captain.  I have a list of doors that need opening, and your approval.  It wasn't getting done, captain."

Fortinbras's hand left her sword hilt, and instead reached out to Horatio.  "I'll have it, then."  She waited.

"I didn't write it down," Horatio said.  She raised her eyebrows, impressed.  He listed off the door coordinates aloud while Fortinbras listened, asking him to repeat several, outright rejecting a few.  She didn't write any numbers down, either.

When he asked her to unlock the medical bays, she stopped him.  "Those are unlocked.  Those have always been."

Horatio shook his head.

Fortinbras gestured to him to stay where he was and stalked several steps down the bridge to snap into an intercom in swift Norwegian.  The responding crackle sounded less than thrilled, but Fortinbras increased the sharpness of her words until no resistance came back across the line.  Horatio, for a moment, missed being able to send messages faster than he could walk.

"The rest will open as they need," Fortinbras said, returning to fall into her captain's chair in a graceful line.  Horatio backed towards the staircase.  "Stay," Fortinbras ordered.  "I know you.  You keep getting things done.  Where'd you spring from?"

"Denmark, captain."

Fortinbras rested her gloved hands against a control panel and waited.  "I was in the ballroom," Horatio added.

Horatio recalled how on the first day, Fortinbras had stayed in the grand ballroom, grease-blue sword in hand, and paced like a penned thing.  Horatio had slumped over his knees on the floor beneath her, not daring to touch Hamlet, but not willing to back away from the body.  Over his head, Fortinbras had tossed orders and questions in equal measure, and received only obedience.  Claudius and the others had been cleared away, but some reason of her own, Fortinbras left Hamlet and Horatio lie.  Horatio didn't cry.  He just couldn't breathe.  When Fortinbras had crouched in front of him and asked pointed questions about control rooms and access codes, Horatio had given the answers blankly, because it couldn't get worse.

"That explains it," she said, and there was a quiet click as the door to the bridge locked, on remote control.  "It has been very difficult for me, learning what happened."

She wasn't going to let him leave.  She had given him doors and in payment, a story.  It was cruel but fair and Horatio was struck again by the newness of this ruler who had invaded Denmark.

Horatio opened his mouth to relate the bleak list of who poisoned whom and started instead, "I had a friend, a friend from school.  He was brilliant and mad, and he cared about Denmark, knew every door and frozen cargo bay...it wasn't his fault.  I showed him a piece of a file that Ophelia had decoded, and it said the captain--Claudius--his uncle, a murderer--in the ballroom everything got wrong.  Before that too.  Ophelia's programmer died, and she is as she is now.  He could have waited and been captain one day, taken Denmark and made it better, but..."

"It is better when everyone has a job to do," Fortinbras said, when the silence grew too long.

"Yes," Horatio said.

Fortinbras's expression shifted, and suddenly Horatio felt like an asset, like he'd been picked up and placed onto Fortinbras's chessboard, when he had been sitting idle in the box of pieces before.  It felt like being useful again, like being pulled back into the swing of politics.  It felt uncomfortably like regaining something he'd lost.

This time when he backed away, Fortinbras unlocked the doors and let him go.

#

The next time Horatio saw the captain, Fortinbras kicked her way into Horatio's quarters, rousing him from staring at a printout of engine efficiency in dull reverie.  Despite the fact that Horatio didn't know anything about engines, he tried to decipher the mad red circling and annotations from the quiet engineering student who had delivered it. Horatio was certain that he had been one of Osric's, from the way he had refused to turn his back on a single one of the guards.

Horatio quickly folded the illicit papers in half to hide the data he wasn't meant to have and then Fortinbras was there, tall in her dress uniform's boots.

She stood between the overhead lamp and Horatio's desk, her dark hair outlined in a dim aura by the backlight, and glanced around Horatio's tiny apartment.

"You should have a better lock," she said, inclining her head toward the door.  "Anyone could get in here."

Horatio raised a hand to brush off the favor.  Fortinbras ignored the courtly gesture, her hands still at her sides like she didn't know how to use them while talking.  He refused to ask her what she wanted; she was going to have to demand it without him offering.

He'd offered everything before--support, forgiveness, redemption--and nothing good had come of it.  Fortinbras reached into one of her pockets and held out a ring threaded with several key-cards and data chips.  Horatio had to get out of his chair to take it, half-standing only to retreat once he'd taken the handful of sharp-edged plastic.

"What's this?" he asked, giving up on his previous determination not to ask questions.

"Access to the Ophelia system," Fortinbras answered.  

Horatio dropped the ring onto the desk.  It landed with a hushed clatter.  "I don't want that," he said, then amended, "I wouldn't know what to do with it."

Fortinbras leveled an impatient look in his direction, and Horatio paled with the realization that he was dealing with the captain of two nation-ships.  He was not a smooth-tongued diplomat of Claudius's court.  He was not supposed to have the documents that lay, seemingly-innocuous, on his writing desk.

Horatio looked up and gave the captain an automatic apologetic grin that faltered and fell under her gaze.  "I could try, captain," he admitted.

"I will have someone fix the lock on your door, then," Fortinbras said.  Her hand fell to the sword strapped to her hip, idly tapping against the woven recycled fibers that made up the grip.  "And you will tell me when you finish working on the computer system."

Horatio watched her as she turned to go, images of the wild turmoil that would ensue if she were to be killed flicking past his eyes.  Denmark burning, with only Osric's small, foolish circle to try to contain the panic.

It couldn't happen, he thought.  Denmark had to adjust and survive under Norway or else it would fail.  The vast airlessness of space would swallow the ship whole.

#

After there was no need to search for extra tasks to stay exhausted.  The sleepless days of reading and re-reading Ophelia's reboot code, trying to find out where he could tweak it to bring her back, soon broke into days of receiving soldier-sent messages, first one at a time, and then in batches, a few a day, informing him of problems both trivial and not.

Horatio went to Fortinbras, after the first messages, and she turned him away with a frown on her face.  "I know.  I told you.  Fix it," she said.

Horatio did his best.

He learned that most of the south decks had to walk halfway across the ship for running water, blocked from the usual places.

Horatio knew one alternate route through the silent portions of Denmark, which had once been lit and lively and now stood dark and creaking.  He remembered all the strings of numbers that had been written on his palm or whispered laughingly into his ear, back in school when the unmapped hallways and echoing empty dormitories had been a boy's dream.  He and Hamlet had boy's dreams then, even though they were almost-men, learning how to pilot the ship and speak to the ancient overarching computers.  Horatio could, if he dared, open a few disused doors.

Without Ophelia to turn on the lights for him, Horatio slipped through the first door into deep black.  It was what the space between stars must have looked like, soft and dark and forever.  Horatio flicked on the lamp he'd brought and walked smoothly through the too-familiar hallways, manually switching the lights on at each electrical box.

The lights revealed a place where a pipe had burst long ago and nobody had noticed, until the running water rusted away part of the floor.  Hamlet would've run his hands through the red rust and chased Horatio, stumbling, into the dark, threatening to drag rouged fingertips across his cheeks.  Careful of the sharp edges, Horatio crossed the weakened area with measured paces.

Horatio stepped back into Denmark proper with numb fingers, having forgotten the lack of heating in the long shut-down parts of Denmark.

The guard jogging in his direction was not entirely unexpected.  Horatio was, however, surprised when she called "Wait!  You are Horatio?" in heavily-accented Danish and eased to a stop next to him.

"I'm--yes?"

She tilted her head to look at him more closely, still slightly breathless from her run across Denmark.

The soldier pulled a scrap of paper from the belt of her uniform, glancing at it repeatedly as if uncertain of its contents.  "The captain wanted to ask you when was the last time you ate."

Horatio didn't answer for a moment, shaken by the departure from his expectations as roughly as if the Norwegian had twisted the gravity field ninety degrees.  He tried to remember the last time he stopped for something as insignificant as food.  "I ate yesterday," he said eventually.

She looked at her note and sighed.  "It says that you will not have eaten in days, and to be sure you are fed soup and put to bed.  And then you are to meet Fortinbras tomorrow morning, at your earliest convenience."

"I will, thank you," Horatio said, freshly bewildered by the mind of the new captain.  He turned to leave, and the guard followed.  "Is there something else?" he asked, nervous again.

"I am to escort you," she said, and even through her accent, Horatio could tell that she was irritated.

True to her orders, the soldier walked him the long way around back to his quarters, then hovered over him while he ate soup at his desk.

Later that night Horatio discovered a small radio on the pillow of his bed, and he knew that Fortinbras meant to keep him.

#

Fortinbras and Horatio stood in the oxygen orchard, arguing about how much they needed to be watered.  Fortinbras reached up and picked a leaf, folding and pressing it between her fingers until it lay damp and broken.  She looked less severe in the dappled light of the ship’s forest, and her dark hair caught green highlights from the fluorescents filtering through thousands of leaves.

"On Norway, we have no leaves," she explained.  "We gave them up when it became too crowded.  It is all algae now."

The crushed leaf in her hand left wet green crescents under her fingernails, belying Horatio's argument that the trees would dry up if more power was not diverted to water filtering.  "It's an old system, but it works," Horatio argued.  "You can slow the ship down, and nobody will starve for air.  There are more people on the ship now, we need all of the oxygen we have."

It was possible that there were fewer people, that the soldiers Fortinbras had brought were balanced by civilians who had fallen in resistance, a thought Horatio wished he could avoid, or make not true by asking someone to reassure him with numbers.  What truth he could get from Fortinbras would not be reassuring, so Horatio kept quiet.

"We need to reach Norway," Fortinbras said, dropping the leaf to the ground.  "We cannot delay."

"A few weeks slower will keep us breathing."

"Norway won't last another three weeks.  I wouldn't have left it, otherwise.  It's failing. Every ship is failing."

The desperation underneath her level voice was sobering.  Horatio kicked at a drift of yellowed leaves.  He had heard, like everyone had heard, that all the nation-ships were breaking; they had spent too long struggling toward new stars.  Arguing with Fortinbras was easier when he didn't know that she had something out in the cold dark of space to cling to, something that was living and in peril.

"It's beautiful," she said, after a moment.  Horatio almost agreed that yes, there was something magnificent and serene about the rows of ordered trunks when Fortinbras continued.  "I grew up in the mechanics of it, underneath the skin of metal that everyone else walked on.  It was so old and so cared for.  Every inch of that ship had been touched over and over, generations of hands touching it.  Your ship is different.  It is larger, and there are more empty beds."

"You're planning to evacuate to Denmark?" Horatio asked, mentally mapping the dangerous corridors filled with long-empty dormitories.  "Will there be space?"

"Is there ever enough space?” she asked, snapping off a low-hanging branch with clinical precision.  "Denmark has less than a year, on this system.  There're no saplings growing, and your older trees are dying.  More water will not help."  The jagged break didn't mean anything to Horatio, but it obviously made sense to Fortinbras.  "When Norway switched over to the new system, our orchards looked like this at the start of the last year."

Horatio took the branch from her and marveled at it, that Fortinbras could spell out Denmark's doom so casually. "So you're saving us."

"I found you in the ballroom," Fortinbras reminded him.  "I think you needed saving. Tell me how it happened, and I will think about the trees.  Norway can afford a day, maybe two."

"Claudius killed his father," Horatio said slowly.  "His--Hamlet's father.  Claudius killed Old Hamlet to become the captain.  That's what started it all.

"I couldn't leave.  I couldn't leave Hamlet alone; he was so determined to kill Claudius, and I watched them try to stop him in so many ways--I couldn't even tell if he noticed, and it was terrible every time.” He swallowed a bitter laugh, and went on, "It was fencing, in the end.  A foolish fencing bout, but the blades were poisoned and it was as deadly as anything.  They both lost--and he stabbed Claudius at the last."

Fortinbras stood still and listened, impassive in the face of Horatio's history.  "The heir, he was the heir to the captaincy," she said softly.  "That was your Hamlet, then."

"Yes," Horatio said, uncomfortable with Fortinbras's assumption that Hamlet had been something of his.  He wanted to look at Ophelia's reboot code again, or at least to touch something he could pretend to fix.

"And you stood by him the entire time," Fortinbras mused, voice almost too low for Horatio to hear.

"Stupid, I know," Horatio said, letting Fortinbras's branch fall from between his fingers.  It landed with one end balanced across his boot and one draped over Fortinbras's steel-covered toe.

"No," Fortinbras breathed, looking up and away, through the leaves to the hanging fluorescents that illuminated the canopy.  Fortinbras tuned to the things she governed like a loadstone, and Horatio wondered if she knew which direction to turn to face Norway.  "No, not stupid."

That afternoon, Fortinbras held a memorial over the stripped-down bandwith of her military speakers, a moment of silence for the fallen leaders.  As the spare words crackled through every inch of the ship Horatio fled for less occupied halls, where he could lean against a chill, smooth wall and gasp for breath.

#

Horatio had meant to slip into the lower deck's dining hall, smile at the bakers in the back kitchen and slip out again.  There was enough sustenance in warm bread and small wedges of cheese to keep him going tomorrow, and maybe into the next day.

The bakers, who spent their days asleep and their nights with dough and yeast, knew about quiet times, and didn't make Horatio talk.  It was noisy--the large mixer banged on each revolution as it mixed the dough for tomorrow's bread, the dishwasher sloshed, the apprentice baker dropped bowls--but they were expected noises, separate from language.

Osric, dressed loudly in several colors, was not part of what Horatio had been expecting.  His hat, made of cream felt, was tipped forward over his hair at an angle so extreme it could have taken half of the engineers to affix.   Osric leaned against the counter, oblivious to the flour that was whitening his sleeve.

"I heard you'd be here, sir," Osric said, with a warm smile and eager eyes.

Horatio wanted to spin around, run away.  He didn't deal with the resistance, he was never dealing with a resistance ever again.  Horatio edged back, obligated to talk to Osric, despite the fact that Osric knew Horatio couldn't do this, not while working with Fortinbras.  Fortinbras would know, and Horatio couldn't always lie to her, and Osric would be dead.

The baker's apprentice gave Horatio a pitying look as she slid a plate piled with bread, pastries and soft cheese down he counter.  Osric drifted in front of the door while Horatio moved to take the food, and then smiled cordially at Horatio as he blocked the exit.  "If you would listen, good Horatio," Osric said quietly, words almost drowned out by the ambient kitchen noise, "I know you're not--pray, hear me out--Horatio, Fortinbras is cold, cold like the outermost hull.  I have heard that she will do anything, anything for Norway; she cares nothing for us.  Horatio, she's deadly, she killed--"

Horatio shut his eyes and gripped his plate of food until his fingertips went numb while Osric listed the casualties of the past few days in far too many words.

"Stop helping her.  She's not--" Osric halted, and there was a pause as he reconsidered his words for a long moment before finishing "--not a Dane."  Horatio knew which name Osric was dancing around, and he refused to feel grateful for Osric's small moment of tact.  The need to take any part of Denmark and make it better, make it anything that wasn't rotten and dying, caught Horatio off guard and made every muscle in is back tighten into knots.

"Someone has to pilot the ship, Osric," Horatio answered flatly.  "And I'm not convinced it should ever be you."

Osric pulled the hat off of his head, smile slipping somewhat.  "That's unfortunate," he said.

"Go away, Osric," Horatio said.  Osri's rebellion was over-funded and lacking in sense, equipped with fine tasseled blades wielded in fine, well-bred fingers.

Osric waved his hat around in a flashy circle.  "We hoped that you would work with the cause.  You lead me to feel you are a danger to us." 

"No, Osric, no.  Your way won't help, if I thought for a moment--"

"Horatio, if, as I've gathered, what you truly desire, truly want, is a stable Denmark, one might say to fix everything, then this is not how you do it.  You were slow to pick sides, friend.  I thought you would choose better."

Horatio knew where killing captains got you.  "I'm leaving, Osric.  Don't get yourself killed."

"And you as well." Osric tucked his hat under his arm and swept out, abandoning Horatio with his plate of bread.  Horatio dropped it back onto the counter, not hungry.  The baker's apprentice looked concerned, but let him leave without a word.  That night Horatio was tentatively thankful for the firm lock Fortinbras had installed on his door.

**#**

Soon the whole ship rocked in a deep, soul-shaking shudder, and Fortinbras sent for Horatio to comfort the fear in the lower decks; it was only that Norway had collided gently with Denmark's hull.  Horatio knew that Fortinbras wasn't building the lattice of bridges that would link the two ships forever, like England and France with their narrow bitter channel.  It didn't make sense, but lots of things didn't make sense anymore.

Then she invited him to the celebratory dinner, and ignored every protest he could think of.

There was no high table, because Fortinbras preferred to eat at the same height at everyone else, but Horatio still felt like he had been pinned up on display for everyone to look at, bullied by one of Fortinbras's more put-upon orderlies into a dress uniform in the old Denmark cut like some sort of officer.  Horatio didn't know where Fortinbras had found the outfit, and was struck by the sudden crippling certainty that the first owner of the clothes was dead.  It could have been one of Hamlet's cast-offs, Horatio thought numbly, although the ship's heir had always been slimmer than Horatio, delicately built from well-bred bones.  Horatio took a moment to assess himself, and discovered that it was not so far-fetched a notion, now.  He looked at the food in front of him, the same food that graced Fortinbras's plate, and felt faintly ill.

"Did he ever dance with you?" Fortinbras asked without prompting, as she watched people mingle, not dancing, in the wide open space between tables.  

Horatio winced away from her, wishing that she had an ounce of politeness in her entire being.  "Did who?  What do you mean?" he asked back.

"Hamlet." she said, slowly, like she was still getting used to the name.  It was not a name uttered often around the ship.

"No," Horatio said, trying to make his voice sound light and perplexed.  He failed miserably; Horatio had never been any sort of actor.  The mad schemes he'd let Hamlet drag him into, first at school for fun and later in the court for deadly stakes, had been all Hamlet's flash and expression.  Horatio had none of his flickering madness.

Fortinbras paused as if she would say something else, but then there was a celebratory toast, and another.  Horatio got through the speeches by dint of drawing code for Ophelia on his napkin, lines and lines of it spilling like a spidery black wine stain around his place.  Fortinbras spared a moment from listening to a toast to her success to lean over his shoulder and read what he was writing.  "That is good," she said, letting go of her glass to skim a finger over the most recent note Horatio had made.

Horatio would have smiled at her, but someone in uniform bent to whisper in Fortinbras's ear, and she nodded once, standing.  Horatio stood too, gathering his notes as he rose.

"I don't feel well," he said.  It was a transparent excuse, but one allowed by the bounds of politeness.  

"Let Somja or Romsdal walk you back," Fortinbras said, gesturing to the soldiers who stood flanking the door.  Horatio flinched, but couldn't deny the offer.

Fortinbras looked at him a second time, and hushed the young officer who was still talking into her ear. "You should have company.  There has been some upset.  It is not good to walk that route alone."

Horatio took a moment before daring to ask, "What upset?"

"Do you want to know?" Fortinbras asked, and Horatio had never seen the choice so clearly.  This was not the side he had expected to stand with, in the end, and it was possible that not knowing was holding him together.

Horatio did not want to be kept together until all that was left was poison held gently in every cup.

"What upset?" he repeated.  He was still standing uncomfortably behind his chair, not quite dismissed from the table and not bold enough to break away of his own volition.

Fortinbras frowned, reluctance written across her face.  "There was some violence on the east deck.  Forces collaborated to break parties out of house arrest, they were apprehended some distance away.  There was a fire in the lower decks, starting in the kitchens.  There were casualties."  Her voice hardened on the last word, cracking against it with enough force to startle the conversations around them silent.

The lower deck's kitchens had been converted from school classrooms decades ago, which had before that been dormitories.  There were few exits to begin with, and the renovations had created a labyrinth of ovens, tables and partial walls.  In a fire, no-one would get out of the back bakery.

"Who caused the fire?" Horatio asked into the small patch of calm.  He squared his shoulders against Fortinbras's answer, then betrayed himself by looking down at the neat double line of rivets securing the upholstery across the back of his chair.

Fortinbras's voice was still as she said, "I do not know."

Horatio hated himself for being comforted by the lie.

#

The following morning Horatio opened the door to meet Fortinbras standing slightly bent in the low hallway, where he had expected one of her soldiers.

"Good morning, Captain," Horatio said, bound by courtesy.  She smiled, hesitant, and Horatio thought that she must have woken recently, to be so gentle around the edges.  "Do you want coffee?" Horatio asked, at a loss for anything more to say.  Fortinbras seemed thrown by the offer, and Horatio wondered if she thought something would be expected of her in return.

"Yes, please," Fortinbras said finally, following Horatio inside.  He had no full kitchen, but there was enough to brew coffee.  Horatio slowly composed hot water, grounds and mugs.  He washed his own from earlier, when he had woken to black coffee and a meeting with a minor official, halfway across the ship.  The engineering school would partially re-open, although it now lacked many of its teachers and students.  All they needed was a few words in the right ears; it was mostly done by now.

Fortinbras took her mug and wrapped both hands around it, looking for somewhere to sit.  Horatio winced at not having enough chairs--there was only his desk chair and a single stool by the counter.  Fortinbras rearranged her fingers around the coffee and settled for leaning against the narrow counter.  "You did not answer, earlier," she offered.

"I was busy," Horatio said.  "You should be busy as well--Norway is here."  He took a grateful sip of coffee, glad for the warmth and the slight acidic aftertaste.  Coffee tasted alive, like it was fighting something.  Fortinbras did not flinch at the strength of the black drink--some things were constant across the nation-ships, and everyone had an affinity for the biting ship's coffee.

"It is a relief," Fortinbras said.  "To have Norway so close.  It will last a few days longer, now that it can be still."

"You love it," Horatio observed.

She nodded.  "Do you know how it feels, when there seems to be no time left, no options, and to be unable to let go?"

"Yes," he admitted.  "Intimately."  She smiled at his tone, and Horatio couldn't recall when he had learned how to joke with Norway.

Hamlet had asked him only an hour before he died if he remembered learning in school about sparrows.  Horatio had shaken his head.  "It's a sort of bird," Hamlet had said with a wan smile.  Horatio recalled vaguely how birds were, that they could fly in air but not in space.  Hamlet had reached up to push, gently, at the hair falling over Horatio's brow.  "There is a special sort of fate to sparrows," Hamlet said.  "No one can really say why they fall when they do."  Horatio had known then without understanding sparrows that something terrible would happen, and that Hamlet would let it.

"Norway's engine needs one part.  It is smaller than a man's torso, and I did not even know its name until a few months past," Fortinbras said.  "Now I know it quite well.  Evidently without it, a ship falls still in the sky."

She pronounced the last dryly, like it was, for her, another joke.

"You would like Norway," Fortinbras said abruptly.  "It is crowded, so there are no dying empty places.  There is too much life on Norway to leave space for ghosts."

Horatio did not know what she was offering, and was afraid to accept anything that she was not going to give.  "I might," he ventured, "It sounds very different from Denmark.  I can't imagine--I've only been here."  Horatio looked down at his plain mug, and thought that he should tell her that he loved his ship.

"Norway is cold," Fortinbras admitted.  "The heat does not work so well, and it is spread over more open rooms.  We wear more clothes, in warm colors to pretend that the color will seep into our bones and make us warm as well.  The coffee and soup are better for that, but we wear the colors anyway."

"Denmark has been colder recently," Horatio said, and Fortinbras narrowed her eyes sidelong at him, not impressed by his contribution to the conversation.

"Denmark is differently cold.  You are the only one who cares for the chill," she said.  "And you are not enough."

"No--" Horatio said, to protest, and Fortinbras cut him off.

"It has been a long time since anyone took care of Denmark.  When its engine is crippled, who will race across the void to find help?"

"I would," Horatio said, but he wasn't certain.  He thought, some weeks ago, he would have cobbled together a ship of cast-off parts and flung himself into space, but now space seemed colder and Denmark less precious.

"Then I am sorry," Fortinbras said.

"Why?" Horatio asked, suspicious of the genuine apology in her tone.  Fortinbras's gaze flashed to his with an uncertain stutter and then halted, her face stilling into a polite mask.

"For your losses," Fortinbras answered, all traces of the genuine gone and replaced by smooth politician's words.  She put down her mug on the counter and straightened to leave, every inch the captain again.  The contrast made Horatio sharply aware of how cold she could be.  "Can you attempt to re-boot Ophelia?" she asked.

"I ran a test earlier.  I could only reach parts of her," Horatio said.  "It went well."

"You could try fully tomorrow," Fortinbras suggested.  "I will make sure you have the access you need."

Had Horatio wanted to destroy Norway's hold on Denmark, he could do it tomorrow, he thought, except that it would not save them.

"Thank you," he said.

"I am glad you are well," Fortinbras said, the words hitching as they threatened to be more than polite.  Horatio watched her duck out of the door and thought of different nations, drifting loudly across the sky.

#

Fortinbras was there when the Ophelia system pinged to life on the bridge.  Underneath the Norwegian operating system Ophelia unfolded, flickering across the locks on the doors and the snarl of confusion where the Norway system was jury-rigged to compensate for holes.

A barrage of error messages appeared on a main viewscreen.  Horatio hurried to hush them.  "Sorry, sorry," he said.  "I know things have changed."  Ophelia dinged and suggested a full-system scan.

Fortinbras stopped him from tapping the go-ahead on the scan.  "Could you have her unlock the holds on the engine room doors first?  The Norway system failed to do so--it was too customized to alter." It was almost a request instead of an order.  Fortinbras was learning, at a reluctant pace, the Dane way to ask for things, how to sidle up to a question sideways instead of demanding it directly.

Horatio hesitated.  "I think it would be better to let her scan the ship first.  There have been a lot of manual overrides."

Had Claudius been captain, not getting his way and put out about it, he would have sighed and talked circles around the issue for the next hour.  Fortinbras just turned her back on Horatio and barked an order into the next room.

Horatio gave in and asked.  "Why?  Denmark's engines are reading just fine, it says here."

Fortinbras waved a hand at him, like it wasn't important.  "I'm certain it can wait.  Have you been eating?"

It was important, and it was an inelegant deflection.  "Stop it, Fortinbras, tell me.  You shouldn't need to get into the engine rooms."

"You haven't been eating."

An aide edged into the room, carrying a neat brown package.  Fortinbras took the parcel and the aide edged back out the way she'd come.  Horatio had a sinking suspicion that whatever was in the package was traditional Norwegian fare, and that he was going to be expected to eat it.

Horatio threw up his hands.  "Oh, please."

Fortinbras held the package out to him.

"I'm not taking that.  I eat."

"I know you, and you don't.  Take tonight to be comfortable." She dropped it in his lap.  It was warm and faintly aromatic; from the weight of the small container, soup.  "Thank you for fixing Ophelia," Fortinbras said.

There was no elegant way to leave the meal behind, so Horatio took it with him.  

#

The soup did not even have time to cool completely before someone came pounding on Horatio's door.  Horatio lifted himself out of bed, where he had not been sleeping.  The corridor was dark, the strips of light set into the ceiling night-dull, despite the fact that Horatio had expected midday brightness.  It was Osric standing outside, not the Norwegian soldier Horatio had resigned himself to.

Horatio realized that something terrible had happened, or was happening.  Osric's silly resistance, despite all of its frills and manners and politeness, was trying to stop it anyway.  "Osric?" Horatio asked, pushing the door open far enough to see that the courtier's hat was missing, his face transparent and more telling than any spoken declaration.

Horatio was not quick enough to close the door.  Osric dragged it open so he could move to shove him against the wall of his apartment, smashing the back of Horatio's skull against the hall light.  The plastic cracked but did not shatter, the blow leaving Horatio dazed as Osric smoothly pulled a narrow sword from the sheath at his hip.  The leader of the rebellion was better trained than Horatio had previously thought, he saw.

"You traitor," Osric snapped in Horatio's face, fear making him vicious.  Horatio strained away from the narrow sword against his jaw.  It was a weak weapon for fencing in earnest, but skin was not tougher than steel, even the poor grey metal from recycled strips of interior hull.  "Fortinbras is in the engine room.  It sounds like half of the engine is dying, and the other half is most horribly quiet.  You let her in, you let Norway destroy everything!"

Horatio strained against his grip, fighting for space to breathe.  He heard the soft click of heeled boots and turned his head, inadvertently drawing his neck against Osric's blade.  The gentle parting of skin stung fiercely.

"I am not in the engine room," Fortinbras said from the open doorway, ringed round by a small cadre of guards.  "I am destroying everything."

Osric let go of Horatio to lunge at Fortinbras, whatever plot he had harbored before replaced with lashing out at the Norwegian captain.  Her guards corralled him easily, then waited for her signal to do more.

A measured tug at his sleeve drew Horatio out of the entryway and under the hallway light.  Fortinbras walked in a tight circle around him, checking for damage.  "You're not hurt," she said, although Horatio could feel a bead of blood running into his collar.

"Fortinbras, what's going on?" Horatio demanded, heart beating with jittering intensity against his chest.  "Tell me you didn't."  Her betrayal, entirely expected, felt bitter against his tongue and caught sharp-edged in his throat.

Her silence answered for her.

"Why?" Horatio asked roughly.

"For Norway," she said, like it was an automatic response.  "There is not much time left for Denmark, and I could never save both.  It's a trade, Horatio."

Denmark was poisoned, had been fencing on without knowing that the cut on its cheek was deadly. Denmark was going to sink into the cold dark.

"No," Horatio said, because he didn't want to die with the things he had never been able to save.  He'd never given up, and it wasn't fair.  "Please, don't. There are so many people--"

"There are many people on Norway as well.  It was always going to end like this," Fortinbras said, but she looked at her guards while she said it, guards who were coming with her onto Norway.

It was happening again.  Horatio fought on the losing side, the side that would never stop for a breath, headed for disaster and loss and Horatio was still not in control.  He still had something to lose, even after he'd thought he'd lost everything to poison and delicate sabers made from hammered heat-shielding.

She reached out and caught Horatio's wrist.  "There's space for one or two more."

 Norway was bright and colorful and loved, Fortinbras had said.  There were no memories there.  "I can't leave this," Horatio said, meaning the Danes or the ship or every ghost he'd harbored there.  Fortinbras's hand tightened around his wrist until he could feel her short neat nails pressing into his skin.

"Don't, please," she said.  "I found room for you."

"Let go."  It was as close to an apology as he could give.

Horatio watched the shudder of her eyelashes, shut tight against her cheeks.  He thought for a moment she might demand from him to know why, but her fingers slid from his wrist, the absence of their warmth leaving his skin artificially cool.  He wondered if she would understand about sparrows.


End file.
